Semi-retired detective Stan Aubray (Willem Dafoe) is pushed back into service to solve a series of gruesome murders. The killings resemble the handiwork of a previous murderer that Aubray tracked and eliminated five years previously. Is it a case of copycat killings, or was the first case never properly solved?
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It should be an elemental rule of good mystery film-making that at some reasonable point, the person behind the killings should be introduced to the audience to create a character worth loathing or understanding. Anamorph skips this part, and we are left with a mostly faceless murderer with a bizarre but unexplained penchant for the artistic display of recently chopped up body parts.
Director Henry S. Miller goes for a bleak and foreboding mood and mostly achieves it. He is helped by Defoe, who does convince us that he is psychologically tortured. Both are let down by a script (Miller working with Tom Phelan) that stalls and offers little in the way of innovation beyond the creative display of murder victims.
It's one thing to entertain audiences with a busy canvass of murder; it would have been much more interesting for Anamorph to also delve into the psyche of the artist creating the mayhem.
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